Heartworms - Glutton For Punishment

When an album begins with 41 seconds of near silence - a track on which little more than atmospheric rumblings and whipping wind is audible - it’s evident that its author is out to execute something very specific indeed. Taking cues from the warcraft and military garb she initially built her image around, Josephine Orme (aka Heartworms) has crafted her debut with the utmost precision - not a screw, not a stitch, not a note out of place. The biblical nothingness of opener ‘In The Beginning’, then, serves as an intentionally stark primer, a palette-cleansing carte blanche for Orme to assert that, though 2023 EP ‘A Comforting Notion’ may have introduced her as an artist, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Where her previous project saw her pegged as a goth-rock poet in the vein of Joy Division or The Cure, here she deftly dodges such easy categorisation, borrowing as much from techno (the pummeling beat of ‘Warplane’), pop (the bright synth motif of ‘Celebrate’) and even classical (the war-mongering drums of ‘Just To Ask A Dance’ have all the spine-tingling drama of Holst’s ‘Mars’ movement) as she does ‘80s post-punk. Thematically, war - perhaps unsurprisingly - looms large, but it’s treated with a care and nuance that befits its complexity: whether in macro, international terms (‘Extraordinary Wings’) or micro, interpersonal ones (‘Smugglers Adventure’), Orme recognises that conflict exposes our capacity for both great cruelty, and great beauty. And never is that more apparent than with ‘Glutton For Punishment’’s twinned, twisted bookends, where she transposes ‘Just To Ask A Dance’’s driving central refrain into the whiplash-inducingly delicate title track, creating a closer that’s at once arresting and incredibly vulnerable. An extraordinary debut that proves Heartworms is a force to be reckoned with.